IT is a journey which has taken her from Toxteth to LA and back again. In her new autobiography Liberating Character, former Footballers’ Wives star Phina Oruche talks about working with Will Smith, dating Robert de Niro and life in Hollywood...and Hollyoaks. Here are some exclusive extracts

MY big break finally came when I worked with Will Smith in a film called Wild Wild West. It was based on an old television show and I was to be the sexy wench Will had an affair with at the start of the film to cement his sexuality...

The scene required us to be naked in a massive barrel. He had a sock on his privates (a very big sock!), and I had on nipple tassels and a flesh-coloured G-string! It was meant to be a closed set but we had all kind of visitors. Naughty Kevin Kline was hilarious, he kept freaking me out by threatening to come and watch me ‘work’.

Jada Pinket Smith was on set all the time. Now that’s amazing because we were doing night shoots and she was in the latter stages of pregnancy with Jaden, so to say she stands by her man is an understatement. But this made it hard for me and Will to do what we needed to do for the screen liaison to look real.

So instead of the hot passionate Wild Wild West opening the producers had envisioned, we just simmered - not so much Wild Wild West, we were more of a lame tame mess that fizzled out.

A film takes about a year to come out, so I had no idea that I was no longer in the film until I went to visit Will on the set of the MTV awards just before it was due to be released. He’s a nice man and was very considerate when we were working together.

We both had to be constantly sprayed with water and his was warmed to a specific 79 temperature but mine wasn’t. When he saw me shuddering with the shock of being blasted he had a word with someone and they heated mine too.

But at the awards he was acting really strangely. I couldn’t understand what was bothering him, but then his makeup artist Pearce pulled me to one side and said: “You didn’t make the cut. They reshot your part with another actress”.

.....I was horrified. Will had told me on sight that I was “a star”, and he meant it. He was incredibly kind and gracious to me, so what had happened? I was reeling, embarrassed, distraught and horrified.

I had told the world and his wife that I was going to be in this film. It had a major bankable movie star in it, and was overseen by a major director at that time in Hollywood, so being linked on screen with Will Smith had the power to cement my career. When agents heard I had been cast I moved up the ladder even before I got on set.

But there is something terribly out of balance when you need a part because without it you feel worthless. Somewhere while I was toiling in Hollywood I had lost perspective. I didn’t have family to ballast me so I had no centre....

For the first time in my life I didn’t know how to fix this one. I didn’t have the heart or the energy, and worse still, I didn’t care to. I cried so much I thought I would die; I was completely humiliated.

I planned to kill myself and was going to do it by putting the gas on...I felt like I was washed up, that all the luck I had found or drummed up had wasted away through my poor choices, because I couldn’t be satisfied with the modelling story I had created for myself. I felt as though my greed had blown up in my face.

Alcoholics Anonymous have a saying: “poor me, poor me, pour me another drink” and I realise now that the pity party I threw was a total waste of time, but it was my only strategy back then when things didn’t go my way.

I owned a naughty American pit bull called Calvin. He was possessive and jealous and loved me in a crazy way. I loved that critter... But there was no need for Calvin to die with me, so I started thinking about how to get him out of the house. I lived too near Sunset Boulevard to let him out, so I felt that if he did go – which, knowing his loyalty to me he wouldn’t – he would get killed immediately by a juggernaut (it had to be something big and dramatic, I’m not an actress for nothing!).

But if he stayed in the house with me he would die. Now that’s not fair. I was also a little tipsy at the time, so thinking all this through was difficult. In any case, I didn’t turn the gas on, I stopped drinking instead. I was so scared by this incident that I didn’t touch alcohol for four years afterwards.

Dating Robert de Niro and more >>>>>

I HAD the pleasure of getting to know Robert De Niro while he was shooting ill-fated film Showtime.

We met on an aeroplane when I was coming back from a press junket for my film, The Forsaken, and he was heading back to work after flying home for the weekend.

I guess we were placed together because we were both paid for by the Hollywood studios. I was tipped off by one of the flight attendants that Mr De Niro would be seated next to me; never has a makeup brush been dragged across my face with such speed and precision!

He was soft-spoken and insisted that I call him “Bob”, which seemed funny since he’s such a legend. It was odd to be on such intimate terms with an actor of that stature.

After that first chance meeting we met up on a couple of other occasions and whenever he took me to dinner the owners closed the restaurant. It was kind of fabulous and kind of creepy, but he was a real laugh.

He was very naughty and powerful and was used to having things his own way. I learned a lot from him.

He was super-focused, getting up at four in the morning to work out, then working 16 hours on set, then on to a production meeting for the next project with his film company Tribeca Films. He was always looking ahead.

This was a man in his sixties, who knows this business better than anyone. He initially wanted to get in my knickers: his marriage was breaking down with Grace Hightower and he was lonely.

I was intrigued, but there is a 30-year age gap that no amount of acting gold could bridge... I think I was just his type. I still believe I have more to offer than making it by visiting a famous man’s groin, but it was a test at the time since I was itching to make my next film and a call from him on my behalf could have changed my destiny.

But I didn’t want to make it like that. We had dinner a bunch of times and he pursued me with a vengeance until he realised that I was not on the menu and he never called again.

LONDON’S modelling scene in the nineties was really exciting for me; I was so obsessed with the top models.

I had a nasty flat in a tower block off the Old Kent road and I was on the top floor. The lift had urine in it and the back stairs had been used by lazy tenants to dispose of months and months of garbage.

I was instructed by my mother to lie and I say I was pregnant in order to get the flat, and the lovely council did what they did to all young, pregnant girls: they put me in a ghetto they thought I would never escape. Wrong!...

I decided to go and work for Storm modelling agency. I was the book girl and Girl Friday. Kate Moss, a scruffy, short girl from Croydon, came in with her one passport-sized photo in her portfolio. I didn’t think she would ever catch on; that shows just how much I knew!...

Fashion magazines meant so much to me. It was a chance to live a different way and I ended up pasting pictures of the girls all over the walls of my dodgy flat. They were all over the hallway, and not in an average teenager kind of way.

Then I also had Nelson Mandela. Keeping him company were Spike Lee, who had burst onto the scene as a film maker; Maya Angelou, whose voice is invaluable to any young girl trying to make it out of a bad situation; and of course Bill Cosby, Lisa Bonet and Kadeem Hardison from A Different World, a spinoff from The Cosby Show.

I didn’t know then, but that mad collage became like a compass. I met, worked with or became friends with nearly all of these people when I moved to New York and later Los Angeles. But they were a million miles from me at this point....

I am not too proud to admit I had no bloody clue about London, fashion or ‘the scene’, but what I didn’t know I made up for in drive and determination. It was a nightmare to break into the business at first. Naomi Campbell was ‘IT’, the only one people wanted.

There were lots of other black models knocking around at the time, but it seemed as though the agencies would only take on one at any given time. I remember going around and being told “we already have a black girl”. Competition was fierce.

Why did I go into the jungle for I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here >>>

IN short, I needed a job. And fast. So I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here it was They had come after me early in the summer but I wasn’t interested.

Even though I needed a job, I didn’t think I would do well with the starvation thing, the 24/7 camera thing and the sharing my life with eleven strangers thing. How right I was.....

I left myself wide open by participating in the show and blame myself for it totally. I decided to do it for my own personal financial gain: to save my house and to pay back my friend.

I also thought it would be a great opportunity to help a young boy named Keiton Knight, who needed half a million pounds for a lifesaving operation.

Apparently you make a fantastic amount for charity by participating.

With those things in mind, I sacrificed my privacy and decided to go into the jungle. Immediately I had the hangers-on calling and texting me.

Fortunately, as I was sworn to secrecy, that only happened the day before my departure because The Daily Star had announced the “Z-list celebs” who were taking part. I was excited to be on the Z-list; at least I was on a list! I was ranked as an outsider and my odds of winning were a hundred to one.

Well that depends on your perspective. I had won already: in one fell swoop I had got out of bone-crushing debt, so whatever happened after that was gravy for me. But enter the celebrity circus and all those who jumped on the bandwagon....

My strategy was this... I had none. I would be myself, warts and all. One of my sisters said I should have gone in there and put on an act, created a character. But that’s already done for you by production; they assign everybody an archetypal character and cut the footage around that.

I was the bitch, based on my Footballers’ Wives profile and based on the way strong black women are portrayed in our media. I played along at first when we were doing the sound bites and stuff in London. I suppose I could have put on a sweet as pie act, but I’m not as sweet as pie.

And boy did I feel set up to be the bad, tough black girl from the start!

I knew the hunger, the lack of privacy, the strategies, the egos and the inane conversation would do me in, and I was right. I am real, I can tell you. I really didn’t care about winning; I just didn’t want to be voted off first.

I have the following regrets about the jungle. Everyone else hired publicists to protect them while they were in there and to control what could be said in the press. I was naive enough not to as I didn’t realise how popular the show was. I didn’t do my homework or understand it and I certainly didn’t see that I was handing them exactly what they needed; that they would be able to edit the footage to make me look like the stereotypical, fierce angry black girl.